Sacred Paws are a long-distance proposition. When the duo convene on the terrace of a South London takeout restaurant one sunny Thursday morning in March, drummer Eilidh Rogers, 32, is laden with bags, ready to catch a train back to her hometown of Glasgow, where she works at an independent record shop owned by indie-pop great Stephen McRobbie of the Pastels. Guitarist and lead singer Rachel Aggs, 29, lives here in Brixton, and the two manage to get together about once a month to practice and occasionally write new material. They’ve been a band for about five years and blame the 400-mile separation for their relatively slim output: one EP (2015’s Six Songs), one single (last year’s “Everyday”), and one album (this year’s Strike a Match).

Yet Sacred Paws’ sound spreads far beyond the length of the UK, putting sunny Ghanaian highlife guitar through a laid-back filter, while their call-and-response vocals echo early Sleater-Kinney, and Rogers’ antic percussion channels post-punk originators the Raincoats, who they recently supported. Named in partial tribute to Rogers’ cats, Sacred Paws are by far the most colorful band on Mogwai’s otherwise pleasingly dour label, Rock Action. When their casual signing offer came in, Aggs went on the imprint’s website and noticed “that they don’t have any women in any of their bands!” she says with the good-natured laugh that ends most of her sentences. “I wasn’t dissing them, but I was like, It’s cool that they’ve signed us, because they need some women!”

The other reason for Sacred Paws’ scant productivity is the sheer number of other acts and enterprises they’re involved in. The duo’s story reads like a micro-history of UK DIY this decade. In 2010, Rogers first saw Aggs play with her funky, complex punk band Trash Kit in Glasgow when they found themselves on the same bill. “I thought I’d say hi,” remembers Rogers, who was playing with the twee-pop group Golden Grrrls at the time, “but Rachel was so shy that we practically imploded when we tried to talk to each other.” A few months later, Golden Grrrls were booked to play one of the first shows at now-defunct East London DIY hub Power Lunches, where Aggs worked throughout its four-year existence. But when that space flooded, they ended up playing in the flat of venue co-founder Andrew Mïlk—who also happens to be Aggs’ bandmate in the acclaimed post-punk band Shopping.

“I remember watching you play drums like, Whoa!” Aggs recalls of that night, before turning back to me. “She’s really good, it’s loose and fun, and she looks like she’s not really trying.” Rogers pretends to be affronted—“I’m trying really hard!”—then returns the compliment. “The minute Rachel starts playing, I feel really calm,” she says, exhaling dramatically for effect.

When two Golden Grrrls moved away, Aggs briefly joined, and the pair bonded over their love of folk, jazz, folk-jazz, Yo La Tengo, and pop, trading mixtapes in the mail. “We got on really well, so we were like, Let’s do another band!” says Rogers. Forming bands is Aggs’ favorite way to hang out with another person and establish a connection, allowing her to communicate through music rather than conversation (though she’s by no means socially awkward in the hour we spend at the cafe).

There’s no agenda behind Sacred Paws beyond spending time together, no designated themes to keep the duo’s different bands from overlapping. “I’m not like, Ooh, shall we do a post-punk band? It’s never premeditated,” says Aggs. “We just have specific types of music that we like in common. We never discuss... anything!” Still, Aggs sees some distinction between the way she writes for her various projects. Where Shopping’s songs are more polemical and pointed, offering spirited critiques of consumerism, Sacred Paws’ tracks unpick anxieties and self-doubt. “When stuff goes wrong/It makes me feel useless,” Aggs admits on “Empty Body.” These are “more emotional and abstract” songs, she says. “Trying to act on a bit of your brain that’s more subconscious.”

Life in Sacred Paws is both efficient and unhurried. When Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite booked them four days in their Castle of Doom studio to record Six Songs, the pair were taken aback. “Four days?!” Rogers laughs. “Last time we recorded we did 12 songs in two days.” They appreciate Rock Action’s casual vibe, but have found their ambitions leveling up as more doors open up to them.

“As you get older, you get more comfortable about that,” Aggs says of their expanding horizons. “When we were recording Strike a Match, we told the guy who was engineering and producing, ‘We kinda want brass, we’re gonna see if our friends can play,’ and he was like, ‘Nah, get a brass section.’ It seemed like a wild idea and really extravagant, but having people say ‘you can do this’ opens up more possibilities and gives you confidence in the future like, Yeah, why not? What else can we add on the next record? We'll have a string section!” She laughs again and reconsiders.“I don’t think so!”

How did you both get started in music and find out about the DIY scene?

Rachel Aggs: If I hadn’t gone to see certain shows when I was younger, I wouldn’t have started a band, because they were predominantly female, queer musicians making really weird music. I thought, If they can do that, I can definitely do a band! That’d be fun! I just wouldn’t have fit into music any other way. I can’t imagine starting a band like, Oh, we better get a manager. It just wouldn’t work for me. I wouldn’t have been able to learn guitar in that situation. I learnt guitar on stage! Those DIY communities and scenes allow you to learn, and make a mess and a noise. In more mainstream scenes, you wouldn’t even try to do that.

Eilidh Rogers: The whole idea behind making music for us is that it’s fun. I can’t really imagine doing it any other way. It’d be funny to have an agenda. None of it was planned!

Rachel, running out of time is a recurring theme in your songs, and I wondered if “Getting Old” is about a generational divide between punks.

RA: There’s so many older people that really inspire me, like the Raincoats, because they’re still doing what they love and it hasn’t changed at all since they first started—their passion for it, and the way that they approach music. So it’s more about how how it’s a bit heartbreaking when people are old before their time.

People giving up on their creativity, feeling that they have to professionalize or grow up?

RA: Definitely. That is something that you experience when you’re making music in a DIY scene. Everything’s really fun, and then people hit 30 and you’re like, Where’s my friends gone?! Everyone’s stopped doing this fun thing now and they’re having children. It’s something you have to deal with when you’re an old punk.

Has your relationship with the music you make, and the way you want to make music, changed with age?

ER: I don’t think it has. I mean, maybe we have less energy! But it feels the same to me. It’s just a continuation of our friendship. It’s what comes out!

RA: Yeah. We’ve added more stuff—we have a live band now. It’s really nice playing with different people, but then you have the different aspect of constantly worrying that they’re all having fun. We’ve become a bit more ambitious.

ER: I don’t know if we have become more ambitious, it’s just more feasible now. We’re in a better position to ask people to do it with us.

Which other experiences have pushed you forward?

ER: Just the way people respond really helps, because it makes you feel like, Wow, people enjoy it, and we’re not as crippled with piercing self-doubt as we probably were initially.

It seems like you both find people dancing to be the ultimate validation of your music.

RA: Completely.

ER: We enjoy playing, so it feels at odds if we’re having fun and we look out and everyone's bored, you know?!

Rachel, you’re also part of the organizing group behind the upcoming Decolonise Fest, which celebrates people of color in the UK DIY scene. What are you hoping to accomplish with that?

RA: We came together through Stephanie Phillips who plays in Big Joanie. She posted on Facebook saying, “Shall I do a festival for punks of color?” We arranged a meeting, and it was just amazing—a bunch of people I’d never met before who had this shared goal. Everyone came from really different backgrounds, some of them were like, “What is punk?” And it was like, Oh, okay! Let’s talk about it!

It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for ages. I thought about starting a band with all people of color, just because I find myself in situations where I’m the only person of color in a room at my own gig so often. It can be a bit lonely and disheartening, because you think, What’s wrong? What is it about our scene that’s not inclusive? So it’s an effort to include people, and I hope that out of it some amazing bands will be formed. That’s what our generation took from bands like the Raincoats and X-Ray Spex—this sense of seeing yourself reflected in the music that you listen to, and punk being something that opens up space for people who feel marginalized or discouraged from giving it a go. You see more people of color onstage and you feel like you could start a band.

CORRECTION: This article originally suggested that Decolonise Fest was organized in response to last year’s Afropunk Fest London, but that is not the case.